Part OneBy: Jean Johnson for Reflux1
No Excuses
“I can’t tell you how many times I hear it,” said Suzanne Schroeder of Portland, Ore. “People talking about the food police, and how if they follow all these rules there won’t be anything they can eat. What they really mean is that they love all that processed food that’s full of fat, sugar, salt and refined grains like white flour. They’re hooked. They don’t want to admit that Americans have turned into junkies, and the fat cats are laughing all the way to the bank. And the worst is that they don’t want to spend the time in the kitchen that it takes to get free of all this.”
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Foods for Health
One key to reducing your chances of getting GERD and type 2 diabetes, is to maintain a healthy weight.
Don’t cut out carbohydrates completely, but eat reasonable portions of foods with complex starches made from whole grains.
Don’t avoid all fat, instead incorporate unsaturated fat into your while eating foods with saturated fat (solid at room temperature) sparingly.
Some studies show that eating foods with chocolate, caffeine and peppermint can worsen your reflux. Avoiding these can be a simple way to reduce reflux symptoms
Learn More
If you’re interested in food history, we recommend the following reads:
Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven – Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
Peter Stearns, Fat History – Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West
Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America
Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet
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What can I say? When you live in one of the nation’s most progressive foodie towns and shop at the local, seasonal organic store, you run into outspoken radicals like Schroeder (who says thank you very much for the compliment).Food to Promote Wellness – Food as Medicine
The revolutionary talk was just Schroeder’s warm up, though. Her main point is: “the thing is that once a person gets off the packaged, processed food chain, their tastes change. It was that way for me and others I’ve talked to as well. As soon as we started discovering that it’s not that hard to cook and get a variety of fresh, unrefined foods in the house to work with – and realize how much, much better we feel – and this usually happens pretty quickly – I could really tell the difference. Anyway, once this starts happening – it’s all downhill from there. Piece of cake,” Schroeder said, with a light laugh as she tosses a couple organic lemons into her cart.
Wellness. That’s the main idea here, although it wasn’t Schroeder that got us thinking about this topic, it was Christie Naze, R.D., L. D., C.D.E., clinical dietician in the Center for Women’s Health at Oregon Health & Sciences University (OHSU).
“Stop dieting and restricting foods,” Naze wrote in OHSU’s 2006 Women’s Health Annual pamphlet, “and instead focus on all the delicious foods you can eat to support health and prevent disease.”
Laura Berg, who rounds out the Portland, Ore., contingency for this article agrees with Naze’s comment on dieting. Two winters ago she accompanied a friend to a weight loss clinic, and while she was waiting she saw personnel selling clients diet bars and canned drinks.
“It was gross,” Berg said. “You know that stuff has sugar or some sweetener substitute that probably causes cancer. Here it’s persimmon season and there are so many lovely things to eat. Star passion fruit.”
Berg’s point that keeping people with weight problems mired in cookie and milkshake land seems counterproductive is fair enough. Why, though, is this going on at all? What do business people sell this model of weight loss. Why do those suffering from being overweight or obese buy it?
How We Got to Be This Way
I confess, as a historian, I’m usually wondering about the roots of contemporary situations. In the case of the processed food bandwagon dosed with sugar and fat, Laura Shapiro’s “Something from the Oven – Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America” (2004) offers some insight – thoughts that may seem to echo Schroeder’s radical philosophy – even though Shapiro is a mainstream, award-winning journalist who worked at Newsweek for a decade and a half, and has published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Granta and Gourmet.
“Back in the mid-‘40s, as World War II was ending, the food industry found itself confronted with the most daunting challenge in its history: To create a peacetime market for wartime foods. Manufacturers and packagers had put considerable expertise into the war effort, not only keeping grocery stores adequately stocked but turning out an array of specially-designed foods that could accompany the armed forces anywhere – from camp to jungle to high in the air,” she writes. “Now a great deal of new technology was in place or under development, and factories were ready to keep right on canning, freezing, and dehydrating food as if the nation’s life depended on it.”
To us living a half century later, the idea of manufactured food might not seem all that odd. But consider that in the 1930s the only processed food most families ate were basic canned goods and some pancake mixes. Bisquick hadn’t even arrived yet, not to mention fish sticks, frozen orange juice, powdered milk, corn chips, or even concoctions like “Froz-n Coff-e” – paper cups holding an ounce of coffee extract for reconstituting – that never quite made the grade. Indeed, the hoops the food industry went through to sell its products to Americans during the post-war era of the 1950s is worth some note.
Take, for example, the forerunner of TV dinners: “Steak meat loaf, stew, and corned beef hash patties, accompanied by vegetables, each item arranged in its own compartment on a plastic plate… ‘From its reception by travelers it seems a success,’ remarked Better Food magazine, adding that Maxson, a frozen food company that had been supplying complete meals to wartime fliers, contemplated entering the retail market as well,” Shapiro writes. “Would families give up ‘the vital element of choice… as to which vegetable goes with what?’ Better Food thought they would ‘in return for ease of preparation and excellence of product.’”
At least we got the ease of preparation. Scissors salads, as one friend calls the bagged lettuces and salad mixes that now make a stand in the produce section, frozen and bottled juices so we don’t have to bother with chewing up a piece of fruit, tons of inner shopping aisle boxes and cans and bags full of food all tidied up and buttoned down with the trusty triad: Sugar, fat and salt.
While these cheap flavorings might not be in every product, across the processed and packaged board they dominate like no dictator ever has. Never mind our health, the stuff tastes good enough, and it’s E-Z, we say, opening our wallets for the extra bills all that manufacturing and transporting costs. (And we haven’t factored in the longer-term effects on the environment that agro-biz generates.)
Laura Shapiro joins Suzanne Schroeder in thinking that the only way out is through the eye of the needle. “Today our staggering rates of obesity and diabetes are testimony to the faith we put in corporations to feed us well. But the food industry is a business, not a parent; it doesn’t care what we eat as long as we’re willing to pay for it,” writes Shapiro. “Although some people think of cooking as choice now, no more necessary to learn than sewing or shoemaking, that perspective holds up poorly when we gaze around a mall or an airport at Americans en masse. Home cooking these days has far more than sentimental value; it’s a survival skill.”
Continued in Part Two
